7 Videos on the topic of seasteading
For your viewing pleasure this week, I have searched out 7 videos on the topic of Seasteading. Seasteading is the speculative idea that humanity's next frontier is in floating cities on the surface of the ocean. One note that I'd like to make is that I actively searched for videos that are skeptical of the idea, but I didn't find any. It's a fascinating concept, and these videos all make good arguments, but I want to emphasize that the concept is very speculative. We'll have to wait to see how things pan out.
So, without further ado, here are the videos:
7. Seasteading on CBS Sunday Morning (2010)
In this 2010 video, CBS Sunday Morning discusses Patri Friedman's vision for Seasteading, creating floating micronations in international waters, 200 miles or more off-shore. Patri Friedman is the grandson of the famous economist, Milton Friedman. The video quotes the grandson as saying,
The great thing about letting people go out and live in their own imagined utopia is that they get the benefit of living under the system that they want and we create data about whether it actually works.
It also discusses a previous version of Seasteading, when an English citizen named Roy Bates created the Principality of Sealand on a decommissioned WWII platform. As of 2010, the video reported that Sealand was up for sale.
The video closes on a skeptical note, asserting that seasteaders would need to duplicate many government services such as mail delivery, sewage treatment, border defense, and education.
6. Free Cities & Seasteading on John Stossel Show (2011)
In this video, Stossel interviews Michael Strong and Magatte Wade about their Free Cities project. In this project, Strong and Wade want to encourage people around the world to create new governments with competing systems of rules. Places where they hope to implement these ideas include:
- Native American Reservations
- Senegal
- Honduras
According to Strong:
What people don't realize is that the developing world is massively overregulated. If we had simply as much economic freedom as Denmark in countries around the world, there would be almost no poverty, and almost no war.
Wade amplifies this point saying:
the fact that we have so many rules, who does it benefit the most? Multinationals.
Stossel asks for examples, and Strong mentions Hong Kong and Singapore, which emerged from poverty into the wealthiest places on earth after 50 years of increasing economic freedom. He gives another example of Dubai, which switched from poverty to massive wealth in a period of just 8 years after implementing British Common Law. His final example is the contrast between North and South Korea, which demonstrate that a society's rules make a profound difference with regards to wealth and poverty.
Last, they move on to the concept of Seasteading. According to Strong, Seasteading in international waters is a massively complex undertaking, but there are opportunities to escape abusive rules with near-shore seasteads in places like Mexico.
(You may also enjoy Entrepreneurs Can Cure Poverty - Magatte Wade)
5. Atlantis Rising: Why Floating Cities are the Next Frontier (2015)
Quirk opens this video by noticing that most Americans are in the global 1%, and that the difference between the typical American and the richest billionaire is insignificant in comparison to the comparison with the world's poorest. He asserts that Americans have been propelled up Maslow's hierarchy of needs such that we're no longer preoccupied with survival, and instead are preoccupied with saving the world. He goes on to claim that the reason Americans are in the global 1% is because of "breakaway experiments with government."
He also makes use of Strong's examples of rule changes bringing wealth from the previous video, discussing Hong Kong, Singapore, and North & South Korea. A new example is the African Island of Mauritius, which went from poverty to a society of home ownership in just 36 years. He claims:
Any humanitarian who understands the principles of evolution should be a seasteader.
An example he gives of seasteading in progress include Shell's Prelude, which is larger than the Empire State Building, and is expected to reside in international waters for 25 years. Another example is the commercial cruise ships - which are the size of skyscrapers. People do everything from golf to rock concerts to business conferences on cruise ships. Quirk points out that if you "park a dozen of these babies together, you've got yourself the beginnings of a floating city."
Quirk's vision for a floating city includes the ability to switch your home to a competing city. He describes the city as a "floating jigsaw puzzle." This level of competition, he says:
will fundamentally change the relationship between the government and the governed such that public servants will become something they've never been before. Servants. Of the public.
Another important component of his vision is the aquapreneur. According to him, aquapreneurs are currently working on just about any problem people care about. This includes carbon reduction, feeding the world, sustainable green energy, and human longevity.
Quirk believes that the first floating city may be viable as soon as 2020, and he calls for an X prize for aquapreneurs.
4. Floating cities to become reality | CNBC International (2017)
In this video, CNBC shows a video announcing plans from the Seasteading Institute to create a floating city in French Polynesia. The prototype city will house 225 people on floating platforms, and it could expand to tens of thousands. Construction is expected to begin in 2019.
3. SeaSteading- Building on the Platform of the Oceans: Patri Friedman at TEDxSF (2012)
In this video, Friedman quotes Robert Reich and Paul Romer saying that societies and rules evolve, but that it's very hard to change them in place. So, Friedman asserts that we need new places to try new rules.
He goes on to propose that if we could experiment and choose, we might consider an open source set of rules drawn from a Wikipedia like rule-book, a form of democracy based on a social media-like connection network, or a prepackaged set of rules that we might subscribe to annually.
But none of this is possible, because the space for experimentation is totally occupied by 18th century rule books. To work around this, he proposes a new frontier, building on the ocean with new ideas: evolution without revolution. He also makes the same point as Quirk, that ocean cities can be modular, which will create a "Cambrian explosion of new ways to live together."
His powerful conclusion is that we focus too much on superficial, individual acts, but that seasteading provides an environment for fundamental, pervasive, evolutionary change.
2. First Floating City Of The World [Full Documentary] (2015)
I haven't watched this video yet, but it's on my list for this week. It's a documentary describing how New Orleans could be reengineered to deal with rising sea levels and Hurricane Katrina style storms. Skimming through the video, one of the truly amazing ideas they consider (around 29 minutes) is the possibility of turning New Orleans into a mobile city, separating it from geography, so that it could change locations when needed.
1. The Freedom Ship (2002)
The Freedom Ship web site says this:
Envision an ideal place to live or run a business, a friendly, safe and secure community with large areas of open space and extensive entertainment and recreational facilities. Finally, picture this community continually moving around the world. You are beginning to understand the Freedom Ship concept of a massive ocean-going vessel. With a design length of 4,500 feet, a width of 750 feet, and a height of 350 feet, Freedom Ship would be more than 4 times longer than the Queen Mary. The design concepts include a mobile modern city featuring luxurious living, an extensive duty-free international shopping mall, and a full 1.7 million square foot floor set aside for various companies to showcase their products.
Freedom Ship would not be a cruise ship, it is proposed to be a unique place to live, work, retire, vacation, or visit. The proposed voyage would continuously circle the globe, covering most of the world's coastal regions. Its large fleet of commuter aircraft and hydrofoils would ferry residents and visitors to and from shore. The airport on the ship's top deck would serve private and small commercial aircraft (up to about 40 passengers each). The proposed vessel's superstructure, rising twenty-five stories above its broad main deck, would house residential space, a library, schools, and a first-class hospital in addition to retail and wholesale shops, banks, hotels, restaurants, entertainment facilities, casinos, offices, warehouses, and light manufacturing and assembly enterprises. Finally, this concept would include a wide array of recreational and athletic facilities, worthy of a world-class resort, making Freedom Ship a veritable "Community on the Sea."
In an irony of timing, the company's web site also says this:
"FSI is pleased to announce that Kanethara Marine Solutions Private Limited will be hosting a Freedom Ship Global Announcement and Investor Expo in Cochin, India on May 29, 2017.
So we'll have to check back after May 29 to see where things stand.
This 2002 Discovery Channel episode of Engineering the Impossible discusses the planning, economics, and proposed creation of the Freedom Ship. The economics were challenging, but became feasible when the designers changed from custom steel parts to low cost prefabricated parts.
An interesting challenge to building the ship is that there is no dry dock big enough to hold it - all of the world's biggest ships are dwarfed by the Freedom Ship's proposed size - so it will need to be assembled in the water.
In comparison to the other Seasteading ideas, a draw back to the Freedom ship is that residents will not be able to join and exit the society by simply docking and undocking their vessels.
Steve Palmer (@remlaps) is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has also been awarded 3 US patents.